Teach With Picturebooks

Picturebooks And Why We Should Embrace Them

You should read short stories because each one will give you the full narrative hit—beginning, middle and end—in double-quick time. You’ll get all—well, most of—the satisfaction of a novel, in one small package that might use up 15–20 minutes of your time.

Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French — a parody of a diary. We expect that if someone has taken the trouble to write something down then it must be something important. But nothing much happens and that is the joke.

Wolves In The Walls— a girl of about 8 or 10 hears wolves in the walls of her house. But these wolves aren’t as scary as they might at first appear…

Loveykins by Quentin Blake — Blake’s work is better known when he pairs with an equally famous author such as Roald Dahl or David Walliams, but he has also written a number of his own stories. Is he equally good at storycrafting as he is at illustration? Let’s see…

The Enormous Crocodile — by Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. I also quote from a Dahl biographer who delves into why Dahl and Blake paired so successfully.

Stickman by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler — Donaldson is masterful with rhyme and scansion but also a master of taking pieces from well-known tales and blending them into something new. I also think that sometimes Donaldson’s books get published even when they’re a bit ho-hum — she is an author with a name who can shift copies of anything. But this is one of her best so far.

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler — Donaldson makes use of mythic structure and the popular trickster archetype to create a satisfying tale based on an old Romanian one.

Where’s Spot? by Eric Hill — my daughter loved these books as a toddler (and beyond). Make sure you don’t buy the cheap versions of these books as they don’t have the flaps, and this series is ALL ABOUT THE FLAPS.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Marjery Williams and William Nicholson — These days the best selling picturebooks are much shorter — more like yarns with a punchline, but this is from the second Golden Age of Children’s Literature and does very much feel like it comes from an earlier age. The influence of fairytale is palpable.

Irish Picturebooks

Stuck by Oliver Jeffers — Technically Jeffers would be in his own ‘Irish American’ category I suppose. Stuck is a great example of what might be described as a ‘gag’ or ‘joke’ picture book which are selling really well at the moment. Others in this category are Mo Willems, Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen. Now, I can’t personally think of any women writing (nor illustrating) best selling picturebooks of this category. The market is dominated entirely by youngish men. I’d really love to know why this is, but the cynic in me suspects it’s not because women aren’t funny.

This Moose Belongs To Me by Oliver Jeffers— an absolutely perfect example of John Truby’s storytelling steps which, for the record, are: Weakness/Need, Desire, Opponent, Plan, Battle, Self-revelation, New Equilibrium. If teaching story craft to your class, use this book. It requires less time than watching an entire movie.

Black Dog by Pamela Allen — This doesn’t appear to be one of Allen’s best selling picture books — others are far more widely known in NZ and Australia, and this is probably because picture books which are metaphors for mental illnesses are niche.

North American Picturebooks

Just Me And My Puppy by Mercer Mayer— Mercer Mayer seems to have gotten sick of this series (imho) because the later books are nothing on the earlier ones. They’re even more elaborately illustrated. This is one of the earlier ones.

The Trip by Ezra Jack Keats — Keats was one of the first picture book creators to depict children of colour and also to present the city as an interesting, non-terrible place.

Rosie’s Walk— Use this classic to teach the concept of ‘dramatic irony’, since there is a big gap between the words and the illustration here, creating an ‘ironic distance’ between illustration and text.

This Is Not My Hat by John Klassen— a good example of what’s popular in picturebooks in the 2010s — stories which are basically gags — but I don’t say this in a disparaging way.

Z Is For Moose by Kelly Bingham and Paul O. Zelinsky— a hilarious story, and the best abecedary I have seen. And we thought it was impossible to make a fresh ABC book! This one works far better than its sequel, about shapes. I think I know why — what do you think?

Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak— Soooo much has been written about this influential book. In fact, it’s been so influential it hardly even looks special nowadays. Here I take snippets from academics and add a bit to the corpus.

Olivia by Ian Falconer — a narcissistic little girl in a pig’s body. When the English turned her into a cartoon they moved her from NYC to the suburbs, which changes the feel of the series quite a bit.

The Dark by Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen — interesting for its art style and use of topology inside a house. The house is fascinating because it’s obviously not the boy’s real house (there are no parents in the story), but rather a representation of how he psychically feels about home.

Thidwick The Big-Hearted Moose by Dr Seuss — One of the earliest picturebooks about moose (which may be a bit on trend recently). This is an example of a cumulative tale and the moral is that there are limits to our kindness, in a format which teaches children, overwhelmingly, to be nothing but kind.

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss — This is a blend of classic mythic structure and the carnivalesque. Notable for using only 50 different words. A typical odd-couple comedy.

Doctor De Soto by William Steig — Stieg made much use of Aesop’s animal characters and this story is a great example of miniatures in storytelling, literary dreaming and humour. A consideration of the gender roles lets us know how far we’ve come since 1982.

The Amazing Bone by William Steig— a wonderful example of an ironic Aesopian animal character and a voice which is so strong it makes up for what might be an otherwise uninspiring plot.

Boss Baby by Marla Frazee — the perfect example of humour which appeals equally to children and adults, mostly for different reasons. This is also an ensemble cast, in which both child and parents have their own self-revelation.

Icelandic

Translated into English

The Magical Life Of Mr Renny by Leo Timmers— an attractively illustrated story which seems inspired by the Chinese folktale about the peasant boy whose paintings turned to real life objects after acquisition of a magical brush. What do you think of the ending?

The Gingerbread Man — For a contemporary take see Julia Donaldson’s Stick Man. This is the Little Golden Book version I grew up with.

Horror

Picturebooks of the horror genre are excellent examples of what John Truby calls ‘the horror flip’, which you’ll find in the best horror stories.

The best horror stories make use of a unique structural flip. At some point there’s a flip between the human and the inhuman. At some point, the monster becomes the hero. This character who we thought was inhuman turns out to be the most humane of all and the human beings turn out to be inhumane, attacking what they don’t understand, what is different from themselves. This technique goes back to Frankenstein.

Black Dog by Levi Pinfold— the house in the middle of the snowy forest and the creepy symbolic objects make this a scene from a horror film, not to mention the massive creature peering in through the windows. Did I mention that bit?

Progressive Narrative In Picture Books — This sort of narrative art is so common in picture books that it hardly needs naming. But if the artist shakes it up a bit they can achieve some very interesting skews.